“To me, this is a dream measurement,” said David Page, a planetary scientist at UCLA who has been involved with the mission since its inception nearly a decade ago. “This is an opportunity to make really rapid progress with a spacecraft this small.” Once the team has mapped the distribution of Antarctic surface ice, they can use it to guide future landers, rovers, and eventually humans to A place where frozen samples can be collected.
Astronauts today have to carry water with them. It’s heavy and incompressible, which means it’s expensive to launch and takes up space that could be used to install more scientific instruments. “Lunar torches could be the key to unlocking longer-lived, more ambitious missions,” said Parvathy Prem, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the project.
Moon ice is also scientifically interesting because it may hold an ancient record of how water got to the Earth-Moon system, Prem said. One day, frozen samples from the Moon could be shipped to our own planet and analyzed for molecular fingerprints that reveal the origin of the ice. For example, the presence of carbon suggests water came from an asteroid or comet. Sulfur means it’s volcanic. Hydroxyl, a molecule with the same composition as water, will make the solar wind responsible. Either of these findings could suggest that the Moon had—or still has—its own water cycle, a sequence of steps, H2O flows between the Moon’s interior, surface, and atmosphere.
Lunar Flashlight takes three months to reach the moon, orbiting to conserve the limited amount of fuel it can carry. Once there, the spacecraft will enter an odd elliptical orbit for the same reason, skimming nearly 10 kilometers above the South Pole’s surface for just a few minutes during its six-and-a-half-day orbit. Page, who leads the mission’s Science Operations Center, believes they will be ready to start collecting data next April, and expects the team to be operational for at least four months after the Lunar Torch reaches orbit, until it, like most lunar satellites, eventually Crash into the moon. He expects the first results to be available by the end of 2023.
Page noted that last week marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 moon landing, the last time humans set foot on lunar soil. Since then, scientists have learned more about what the moon can reveal about our cosmological past, and what resources it can provide for our interstellar future, he said. “The effort to go to the moon is very exciting,” Page said, and the Lunar Flashlight is an important contribution to that effort — “whatever we find.”
